I’ve seen the dust so black that I couldn’t see a thing,
I’ve seen the dust so black that I couldn’t see a thing.
And the wind so cold, boy, it nearly cut your water off.

I seen the wind so high that it blowed my fences down,
I’ve seen the wind so high that it blowed my fences down.
Buried my tractor six feet underground.

Well, it turned my farm into a pile of sand,
Yes, it turned my farm into a pile of sand,
I had to hit the road with a bottle in my hand.

From Dust Bowl Blues by Woody Guthrie (1930s)

Drought began in the U.S. in 1930,
shortly after the country collapsed in a massive economic depression. That
drought lasted until 1937 and affected almost every state in the country at
least for one of those years. The worst hit areas were in Oklahoma,
Texas, Kansas,
Nebraska, Colorado,
and New Mexico.

Caused by higher than normal
temperatures and lower than normal rainfall and snowfall, the droughts led to
giant and widespread dust storms. The storms started in 1932. By 1933, the
frequency and scope of the storms had increased dramatically. In April of 1933
alone, the U.S. Weather Bureau reported 179 dust storms. And in November of
1933, a dust storm originating in the western states reached New York.

In 1934 the intensity and scope of
the storms increased even more. A storm starting in Montana
and Wyoming on May 9 of that year reached Madison, Wisconsin, and Dubuque, Iowa,
on May 10. By that evening, 12 million pounds of dust were falling on Chicago. The next day,
the storm reached the eastern seaboard.

Starting in 1935, the worst of the
storms were concentrated in what was called the dust bowl by the people of the
time. The dust bowl, as I’ve indicated, included much of the Texas
panhandle, all of the Oklahoma panhandle, the
eastern third of Colorado, the western half of
Kansas, and parts of New
Mexico and Nebraska.
The storms lasted until 1941, with the worst storms occurring in the dust bowl
in 1937.

Some of the storms were like
winter blizzards, with giant black clouds of dirt accompanied by lightning and
thunder. The worst of these “Black Blizzards” took place on Sunday, April 14,
1935, known at the time in the U.S as Black Sunday. The second kind of dust
storm, called sand blows, were more frequent and buried fences, livestock,
tractors, and homes with sand.

The dust bowl was immortalized in
song, photographs, prose, and film. Woody Guthrie’s songs were perhaps the best
known at the time. His Dust Bowl Ballads
were recorded by RCA in 1940, but he had been writing and performing them
throughout the 1930s. Dozens of photographers recorded the plight of the dust
bowl inhabitants, including such photographers as Dorothea Lange, who produced
some of the most haunting images of the time. John Steinbeck’s bestseller Grapes of Wrath (based on his travels to
the dust bowl and reporting on the area) was published in 1939. The following
year John Ford directed the movie of the same name starring Henry Fonda.

The U.S. government took a number of
steps to combat the dust bowl, including the construction of a massive system
of dams in the western states. These dams provided water to people,
agriculture, and business in the western states, as well as cheap electricity.
The electricity, in turn, made it cheap to pump water from deep underground.The government investment made it possible to
reestablish and intensify agriculture in the dust bowl region, and fueled the
growth of urban areas such as Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los
Angeles.

Now the ground water is running
out, being used up 14 times faster than it can be recharged, and drought
conditions are returning due to global warming. Some people, it seems, can not
add 2+2 and get 4. Just as in the 1930s, the fundamental problem is not
technology but our economic system, which treats water as a commodity to be
used for profit. The use of water as a mostly free commodity to be taken and
used to make a profit has resulted in the waste and irrational use of a limited
resource. The swimming pools and golf courses of Phoenix
and Las Vegas
are some examples.

Rational use of this invaluable (I
would say sacred) resource can only come about under a democratically run
socialist society that is based on principles of justice and sustainability.
Our political misleaders in the Democratic and Republican parties are not doing
anything about the looming crisis. It is time for the rest of us to start
working on short-term and long-term solutions. After all, we don’t want to get
the “dust bowl blues.”